Diaspora: True Tales of Demographic Displacement, Mandatory Migration and Existential Exile, David and Linda Kerekes (TransVisceral Books 2015)
It’s been said that you’ll have more success juggling jelly than you will predicting what TransVisceral Books will come up with next. It’s hard to disagree. From Miriam Stimbers’ unnatural history of the backside to Sam Salatta’s pop-up book of serial slaying, TransVisceral are continually expanding their readers’ horizons, coming out of left field like a great white on steroid-stoked roller-blades, swinging a lead-weighted pool-cue that’s guaranteed to knock you for 6-6-6.
With Diaspora, they’ve just done it again. It was a major coup to secure the polymorphously perverse partnership of David and Linda Kerekes as editors for this book. Not only have they harvested contributions from a host of big names – the aforementioned Stimbers and Salatta, to name but two – they’ve penned memorably mephitic contributions of their own. David traces the roots of his key commitment to counter-culturality to his outsider status as son of a refugee from communist Eastern Europe. But, as ever, he finds plenty of chuckles amid the autobiographical analysis. Here he is recalling some never-forgotten advice from his mother Mirima:
Mom looked at me with uncharacteristic severity, emphasizing her words by waggling her tomato-stained forefinger: “A true Gypsy don’t never lie, don’t never steal and don’t never ’it a woman, Davitschko,” she said. “You always remember that, eh? But most of all,” she went on with a sudden twinkle in her eye, “a true Gypsy don’t never get caught!” I laughed, nodded and knew that I had been initiated into another of Mom’s home-country secrets. (“Gyppo Kiddo: My Life in the Roma Diaspora”, pg. 356)
Elsewhere, Linda Kerekes describes another kind of migration and another kind of diaspora: travel across the tightly policed, but highly ambiguous, border between so-called “male” and “female”, so-called “man” and so-called “woman”. Her descriptions of her gender-reassignment surgery are not for the faint-of-heart or weak-of-stomach, but they help make this book even more impactful and even more esoteric. TransVisceral have come up trumps again, unleashing another vibrantly visceral beacon that will sink its turbo-charged talons deep into the post-normative underbelly of your subconscious.
And then some…
• Thiz Iz Siz-Biz…
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Papyrocentric Performativity 